What’s in a name? Would an insurance policy in any other name but your nonprofit’s still protect your nonprofit? Do the names in your additional insured endorsements matter? Would your policy be any fairer if you did not willy-nilly add every Tom, Dick, or Harry to your policy as additional insureds on a primary, noncontributory […]

An (Extremely) Brief History of Insurance You can go to Wikipedia or the stacks at your local university if you want a ton of detail Some of the first hints of insurance trace back to ye olde Babylonia, China, and other ancient cultures (BC era). In Athens, they’d get loans for their cargo and pay […]

Insurance is for things we can’t predict: The weather People Our health The legal climate Storms, dumb decisions (or interpersonal conflicts that squeeze out the worst in us), the random disease that no one saw coming, or a jury of our peers or some new statue (which, I suppose, goes back to the unpredictability of […]

There are a lot of shoulds, have-tos, and don’t-want-tos in commercial insurance. There are the coverages that you should have because you have the exposure to potential loss – and you will admit it’s a good idea. There are the coverages that you have to have because you have a contract with someone who won’t pay you […]

I remember being a wide-eyed prospective insurance agent sitting in licensing school when the venerable Al Bing beat words like ‘subrogate’ and ‘indemnify‘ into my head. He also beat into our heads the idea that medical expenses pay ‘regardless of fault, regardless of fault, regardless of fault.’ I’ll save that principle for a future post. […]

We insurance agents use a lot of fancy words. Let’s take the mystery out of one of them today. Indemnify (the verb) or indemnification (the noun). Basically, it means to ‘make right’ or to ‘recompense’. An insurance company might indemnify you by trying to replace what you lost. If your car gets damaged, the insurance […]